The Cotton Queen (24 page)

B
ABS

L
IKE
FIREFIGHTERS
running into a burning building or soldiers patrolling the war-zone perimeter, I grew accustomed to driving into Dallas for my new job, always aware of the danger there. I liked what I was doing. My job was not the most creative, I suppose. All the exciting planning and design details were done by Ardith or Geoffrey. I was involved with the grunt work. Making sure the table setup was exactly as planned, the caterers were fulfilling their commitments and that the site crews followed through with cleanup. The locations I worked were mostly downtown or at one of the country clubs. Our clients were wealthy, corporate or both and they were willing to pay a great deal not to have to think about whether the napkins would clash with the posters from the new ad campaign.

And I have to admit that it was a very good feeling when I was able to call Acee and tell him that I was no longer going to need my stipend.

“I’m not making enough to take on the mortgage yet,” I admitted. “But I’m working toward that goal.”

He didn’t make light of my efforts or tell me that it was unnecessary. Acee, being Acee, expressed thanks and applauded my efforts.

So despite still having that queasy stomach on the morning drive every day, I was feeling pretty good about myself and my life.

That was until Laney called me.

“Guess where I’m calling from?” she asked me.

“Where?”

“Fiji.”

“Oh, my heavens! That’s fabulous.”

“It is, Babs,” she said. “It’s totally fabulous. You just can’t believe how beautiful it is here. And guess what else?”

“What else?”

“Robert and I got married three days ago.”

I was so stunned I just gasped, for a moment I couldn’t speak.

“Babs? Are you there?”

“You got married?” I finally managed. “In Fiji?”

“No, we actually got married in Houston before we left,” she said.

Somehow that was even worse. My only daughter, the most important person in my life, had made the most important change in her life and she hadn’t even invited me to share it. As a mother, somewhere I’d gone really, really wrong.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Ardith told me when I confessed the news to her. “It happens all the time. These kids don’t do anything like we’d hope they would. When they get back, we’ll throw a lovely party for them, as fabulous as any wedding reception and we’ll be saved all the white dress and thirteen bridesmaids nonsense.”

But upon Laney’s return, she made it quite clear that she was not having any big fancy party.

“You can have a small celebration at your house,” she told me. “No catering. No cake. Family only.”

It wasn’t enough, but I accepted what I was offered, a small, intimate family gathering. Fortunately the family was growing larger all the time. And I defined it on a grander scale, inviting the entire Hoffman clan, as well. With all the cousins now married, the inclusion of the spouses and their families, they pretty much made up half the town’s population.

Robert and Laney drove up that morning. He had never visited McKinney and spent some time wandering around the downtown neighborhood. He liked it very much, but not in a way I particularly appreciated.

“The place is like a time capsule,” he said. “It’s a throwback to another era. It’s completely frozen in the fifties.”

“Most of those buildings are turn-of-the-century,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but the fact that nobody’s figured out a better use for downtown space since then, it’s just wild,” he said. “You could just put a fence around it and sell tickets. Welcome to Retro World! Maybe you could make a two for one deal with Six Flags Over Texas.”

I just tried to ignore it and think the best of him. He was Laney’s husband and therefore I was obligated to get along. But the man just wouldn’t let the subject drop.

“We like it the way it is,” I heard Pete telling him that afternoon at the party. “The good news is we can still walk around and window-shop and have everything close at hand. The bad news is, these old buildings can’t be refitted for a business like mine where lots of high-tech equipment is used.”

“So, you just leave the downtown alone and build out on the perimeter?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what we’ve done so far.”

“Well you’d never see that in Houston.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Pete agreed. “The land values downtown are through the roof. They’re knocking down everything to put up all those new skyscrapers. I guess you could say that we’re lucky here. We’re booming, but not so fast or so successfully that we’re going to choke on it.”

“Canapés?” I said, offering a plate between the two.

The party was going very well. The children were running wild in the backyard, giving their parents an opportunity to converse at normal volume in the living room and the den. The entry hall was a virtual mountain of packages for the newlyweds. And on the formal dining table I’d laid out my pièce de résistance. Laney had refused to have a cake. So, in substitution, I had five dozen tiny marzipan swans swimming among edible flowers on sterling silver trays.

She’d groaned aloud at the sight, but I was certain that in the long run it would make for lovely memories. With that in mind, I shot an entire roll of film just of the table.

I expected Aunt Maxine to help me serve. But she seated herself in the den recliner and allowed the festivities to come to her. Doris filled in and, as always, she was amiable and competent. Her older boy was now a freshman at U.T. and she was very proud of him. She chattered on about his classes and his activities to anyone who would stand still long enough to listen. But when the two of us were alone in the kitchen, her topic of discussion changed abruptly.

“I wanted you to know that Acee is really pleased about how you’re getting on with your life again,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m glad about it, too. And I’m sure that with two boys to educate, the last thing you and Acee need to worry about is supporting his ex-wife.”

Doris shook her head. “Oh, it’s nothing to me,” she said. “It’s Acee’s money and even when things get tight, I just laugh, ’cause I’ve seen a lot worse times in my life.”

“Yes, I guess you have.”

“I think it’s funny when people whine about having to pay bills,” she said. “I love to pay my bills, ’cause it’s such a thrill to have the money to do it.”

“I think you may be right, Dorrie,” I said. “I get a bit of a thrill out of paying mine, too.”

I was chuckling and glanced over at her. She was looking at me intently, thoughtfully, seriously.

“What?”

“You do know, Babs, Acee is still in love with you.”

I didn’t know what to say. My first thought was to deny it, but how could I presume to know Acee? Doris did know him and she was not the kind of woman who needed to fabricate drama in her life.

“Oh, don’t worry,” she assured me quickly. “I know that he’d never do anything about it. He’d never leave me or hurt me. He loves me, too, I’m sure of that. I just wanted you to know that. In case, well, in case you ever needed to know that.”

I tried to be honest with her. As a woman who is basically unsure of her own mind in terms of relationships, I tried to be as open as I could on how little I understood of my feelings.

“I love him, too, in my own way,” I said. “I guess I always will. But I was never able to love him the way that you love him, Doris. And I was never able to make him happy. These days, he seems very happy.”

“Thank you for that,” she said.

Laney burst into the room with two arms full of dirty dishes.

“Here you two are,” she said. “I was wondering if the serving staff had deserted in the line of duty.”

“Of course we haven’t deserted,” I said. “And you shouldn’t be picking up, you’re the bride.”

“You say that, Babs, as if I’m likely to forget.”

“Did you see who Renny brought?” she asked us both in a whisper. “Judy Bykowski. What’s that about?”

“Probably just what you think,” I said. “At least she didn’t bring the baby. She must have left it with her mother.”

“Baby?”

Doris gave her the news. “Judy had Ned Hoffman’s baby, but he wouldn’t claim it. So the Hoffmans act like the child is nothing to them. But there’s not a soul in town who can’t recognize that kid as a Hoffman from five hundred yards.”

“Oh, how horrible.”

“So now she and Renny are dating,” I said.

“Oh, it’s more than dating,” Doris corrected me. “She and that baby are living down there with him in Maxine’s house.”

“People are
living together
in McKinney,” Laney said. “It must be the scandal of the decade.”

“Oh, it’s more than a scandal, darling,” I told her. “It’s an epidemic. There are these unmarried couples all over town now.”

“What’s the world coming to,” Doris said, feigning shock and dismay. “In my day, if you weren’t married to a fellow, well you did him in the backseat of the car while you were parked behind the Jiffy Dog, not in the privacy of your own bedroom where the whole town could speculate about it.”

Laney responded to that very inappropriate comment with the most delighted giggle I’d heard from her all day. It sounded so good to me that I couldn’t scold her. It was then I realized what had been missing in this wonderful celebration. It wasn’t the solemnity of the ceremony or the gaiety of a grand reception, it was that neither the bride nor groom displayed any of the giddy optimism that typically accompanied a wedding.

When Doris headed back out to the punch bowl with a pitcher of Agua Fresca, I pulled my daughter aside.

“Are you happy?” I asked her.

“Of course I am, Babs,” she answered. “What a silly question.”

I nodded. “It’s just that both you and Robert seem, I don’t know, a little subdued.”

“It’s the price of oil,” she told me. “The glut on the market has driven everything down. It’s a problem for Robert. It means trouble on his job, that’s all.”

“I thought cheap gas was supposed to be good.”

Laney shrugged. “I guess it is for anyone who doesn’t work in the energy industry. Don’t worry, Babs, it will rebound. And it shouldn’t affect you much anyway.”

She was wrong about that, of course.

In the next year, lavish entertainment, and therefore the events business, took a tremendous hit. Ardith and Geoffrey had less and less need for me. And the plan to open the store in Plano went completely by the wayside.

“Things will pick up,” Ardith assured me. “But until they do...well, if you get offered some other kind of work, I think you should take it.”

That seemed rather unlikely as unemployment was way up all over town. But it was worse in Houston where the oil industry was the base of the entire economy. Robert lost his job. Laney was hanging on by her fingernails.

I knew that I was lucky to get as much work as I did. But I was no longer willing to spend huge blocks of time sitting at home. I began to comb through the classifieds, going out for interviews, even pestering Kathy at the employment agency to find me something. Jobs were, in the Texas vernacular, slim pickings. I was willing to talk to most anyone about anything. That was probably why Kathy contacted me about a position that had just been posted.

“It’s part-time work at a nonprofit agency,” she told me. “They get funding from United Way, philanthropical foundations and community and business sources, but what they need is somebody to manage a year-round campaign that’s both fund-raising and public awareness. They want to get their name and their number out there.”

“That sounds interesting,” I told her over the phone. “And I wouldn’t mind part-time. That way I would still be able to do things with Ardith and Geoffrey.”

“That’s what I thought,” Kathy said. “And a lot of this work you could do from home. I know you’re not crazy about the McKinney/Dallas commute.”

“So great, when can I talk to them?”

“How about tomorrow,” she said. “It’s always good to jump on these things as quickly as you can.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Go ahead and set it up. What’s the agency called?”

“It’s the North Texas Rape Crisis Services.”

My heart momentarily caught in my throat. “Rape Crisis?” I finally managed to blurt out. “What do they do?”

“Oh, I don’t know, really,” Kathy said. “Let me look at this flyer they sent me. They do victim advocacy. They monitor legislation. Here’s the mission statement, ‘To provide comprehensive services to victims of sexual assault and their families.’ I know they have a hotline. Women who’ve been raped can call in anonymously and talk to counselors.”

There was a strange sort of buzzing in my ears. And my hands were shaking so badly, I could hardly hold the phone.

“What...what a wonderful idea,” I managed to get out.

“What?” Kathy said. “I didn’t get that. Are you interested in this?”

No! was the first thought that screamed through my brain. A job was supposed to take my mind off things I didn’t want to remember. I couldn’t take a job that would remind me every moment of every day of the most traumatic event in my life. It was long past time since I should forget that it had happened. It was ridiculous how that one awful night continued to color my decisions. This was a job, a job I would certainly be able to do and to do well. It was for a good cause. It shouldn’t matter that it touched me in a personal way. I should do this. I couldn’t let the past imprison me forever.

“Yes,” I said, and then more forcefully. “Yes, I’m very interested. I think this might suit me perfectly.”

L
ANEY

R
OBERT
AND
I
had been living large in the early eighties. Our clothes were from the best designers. Our gadgets the coolest and most up-to-date technology. We’d turned our modest cottage into a three-thousand-five-hundred-square-foot showplace. He had his BMW and I had my BMW. We had a boat that we moored at Galveston. We worked like Energizer bunnies all week and we partied hearty every weekend.

When the North Sea oil came into production at the same time Mexico started exporting, the OPEC monopoly couldn’t maintain its market share. The price of crude, that had been flying so high and us with it, dropped like January temperatures and those who were hoping for an early spring thaw seemed doomed to disappointment.

The company Robert worked for was one of the first casualties. Without profits to be made, investors couldn’t be cajoled to put money down. And without that capital, independents went under.

My husband was shocked, but ultimately philosophical.

“This is not the only game in town,” he said, and then chuckled. “Well, maybe it’s the only game in
this
town. But Wall Street is buzzing big-time. I can make money in the stock market just sitting here in the house in my pajamas.”

So we pared down our lifestyle, retrenched our finances and tried to ride things out.

Robert started his day at 4:30 a.m. at the close of the Nikkei in Japan. By the time he got their business day analyzed, Wall Street would open. He would buy early in the day those things that he thought would go up and sell them for a profit at the close of trading. It was intense and exciting. Not that different from high stakes gambling, and just as addictive.

Robert was good at it. And he was having a great time. Several of his buddies, including Greg, were also in the game. And after the bell in the afternoon, they met at Kazoo’s, a local bar, to rehash their successes and one-up each other.

I continued to go to work every day. My former dreams of climbing the corporate ladder and becoming a female CEO were being replaced by more temporary goals of staying employed. In a way, I was lucky. All the men who’d supervised me, Carmington, Thrushing and the rest, were the first ones to get their heads on the chopping block. What had once been accomplished by entire department staffs was now being handled by myself and a few other low-level managers, desperate to scrape by.

The end came for me in the spring of 1986. I went in one morning to find that employment for everybody but the lawyers and some of the accounting staff was severed immediately. I had been expecting it, but I was still crushed.

“Hey, don’t worry,” Robert told me. He was so happy and jazzed up that evening that he couldn’t manage to conjure up even a smidgeon of sympathy for me. “Let’s see it as an opportunity.”

“An opportunity? An opportunity for what?” I asked. “I can’t be a day trader, too.”

“Well, you can be something else,” he said. “Haven’t you said to yourself a million times, ‘if I didn’t have to go to work every day I could...’ Haven’t you said that?”

“Sure.”

“So think about it,” he said. “Take this time off as an opportunity to do something you’ve always wanted to do.”

I resisted the idea that was in my mind. For some reason it took me months to speak it aloud. Finally near the end of summer, I let Robert in on my thinking.

“If I’m just going to be stuck here at home,” I said. “It seems like a perfect time to start a family.”

His jaw dropped open and he just stared at me for a long moment. I wished the words back in my mouth, but they wouldn’t go.

“Gosh,” he said, finally. “Is that what you want? You’ve been so into your career. I wasn’t even sure that you were even interested in motherhood.”

I shrugged. “I’m already not working,” I pointed out. “I could have a child now. And by the time the economy picks up, he’d be ready for day care or something.”

“Fine,” Robert said. “It’s not like we don’t like kids.”

“Right.”

“I guess we both always thought we’d do that someday.”

“Exactly.”

With that seemingly brilliant plan and less than optimum commitment, I quit taking the pill and began preparing my life for this mommy temp job. I read some books, looked at some furniture. And waited for my periods to stop.

Getting pregnant took longer than I expected. It wasn’t completely for lack of trying. Robert had always been interested in sex and continued to come home from Kazoo’s ready to jump my bones. But I began to notice that with the amount of alcohol he was consuming, he was less and less able to complete the process he started.

So I began to nag.

“Don’t drink,” I’d tell him as he headed out the door one afternoon.

“Two beers only,” I’d remind him the next day.

“This is becoming a habit,” I warned him the evening after that.

Finally I confronted him. “You are drinking too much,” I told him.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “I have a couple of brews to take the edge off and that’s it.”

“No, that’s not it,” I insisted. “You’re getting drunk every day. There is something wrong with that.”

“I’m celebrating,” he said. “When you day-trade, there’s something to celebrate every day.”

Since Robert wouldn’t see what was happening, I decided I would talk to Greg about it. The two were still best friends, still doing the same jobs, still friendly competitors. If I couldn’t get my husband to listen, then maybe his best buddy could.

“I want you to start hanging around the house here,” I said to him. “When you guys go off to Kazoo’s Robert’s drinking too much.”

Greg chuckled and shook his head. “He’s not drinking that much,” Greg insisted. “He’s just downing a few beers to chill, level out a bit, you know. You can’t blow and not drink, it makes you too speedy.”

“What?”

“The coke has more than just the high,” he said. “It has this jittery thing going, you’ve got to get some booze with it to even that out.”

“Coke? Robert is doing cocaine?” I was staggered.

Greg looked at me as if I was crazy. “Where have you been?” he asked as a facetious joke.

I confronted my husband that very day.

“I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d react just this way,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to matter that you’ve lived here in Houston almost ten years. You’re still not much more sophisticated than the day you left McKinney.”

“Sophisticated has nothing to do with it,” I told him. “There is nothing sophisticated about addiction.”

“See, that just shows how little you know about it,” he said. “Cocaine is not addictive. It’s a recreational drug. It’s not like heroin or speed. It’s just a nice, fun high. It feels great and then it’s over.”

“If it’s so over, then why are you doing it every day.”

“I do it because I enjoy it,” he said. “When I quit enjoying it, I’ll quit doing it.”

He continued to discount my arguments, to ignore my complaints. I was so worried, so upset, so angry, so consumed by this unexpected serpent in my Garden of Eden that at first I didn’t notice my own symptoms. I’d been waiting for months to feel queasy. Now I was throwing up in the toilet every day and thinking it was only nerves. As soon as it dawned on me that it might be something more, I hurried to the doctor and had my condition confirmed.

“You can’t continue to do this with the baby coming,” I told Robert. “This is an ultimatum. If you want to be a father, then you have to cut out the drugs and the drinking and all of it.”

“Laney, be reasonable,” he said.

“I am being reasonable,” I insisted. “I don’t want our child to grow up around this. If you really can give up the drugs, then you have to do it. If not...if not, then we’re out of here.”

Those were tough words, it was a tough stance, but I was completely serious. There are times and situations that simply brook no argument. Fortunately Robert didn’t try.

“Okay, babe,” he said. “I can see that this is really important to you. Stay calm. If you don’t want me to do coke, I won’t. It’s as simple as that. You and the baby, you’ll need me around the house more anyway. I’ll quit going to Kazoo’s. I’ll start doing more stuff around here. In fact, I was thinking about starting my own business. Things are still bad in energy, but there is so much money to be made in the stock market, I’m thinking that I might get into it on a bigger scale. Start managing other people’s money as well as my own.”

He reached over and pulled me into his arms. He patted my still very flat tummy. “It’s amazing what a guy can accomplish if he’s got the right kind of incentive at home,” Robert said. “You and this little guy in here, they are just what I need.”

I believed him. Probably because he wasn’t lying. He believed it himself.

But as I prepared my nest and readied myself for the upcoming blessed event, I lost sight of what was happening around me. In my self-involvement with maternity clothes, prenatal classes and discussions of Lamaze vs epidural anesthesia, I failed to notice that Robert was disappearing. Not just from the house and from my life, but his entire person was slowly being obliterated from the face of the earth.

One afternoon in mid-October I was in the doctor’s office. I’d just had an ultrasound and she said that the baby looked great.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” I asked.

She scooted the wand across my stomach a few times more. “I don’t see a penis,” she told me. “That’s not definitive, of course, but I’d say there’s a good chance that this is a girl.”

I hurried home to give the news to Robert. I was full of excitement and enthusiasm.

It died as soon as I got into the house.

My husband was high, obviously, seriously, high, but there was nothing upbeat about his mood.

“It’s all over,” he told me.

“What’s all over?”

“Everything,” he said. “It’s all gone, every bit of it, gone. It’s all nothing. Nada. None.”

I tried to make sense of him for several minutes, then gave up in frustration.

“I’m not talking to you when you’re like this,” I said. “When you come down from wherever you are, we’ll discuss why you’ve been into the drugs again.”

“I’m never coming down,” he said. “There’s nothing to come down to. There’s nothing left.”

I waved away his words as nonsense and went upstairs.

The truth of what he was trying to tell me came in jolting pieces of information over the next few days. Robert had lost a fortune in the Black Friday crash. Not just our fortune, which would have been bad enough. He lost the fortunes of the investors of his new fledgling business. He lost a fortune in money borrowed against our house, our cars, our household goods, our credit cards. Robert was right. There was nothing. Overnight we’d gone from being trendy, upwardly mobile yuppies, to homeless, jobless debtors. The only thing that stuck solidly with us was Robert’s drug addiction.

I tried to help him. He didn’t want help. He and Greg sat in the living room day after day, doing drugs, drinking beer and watching TV.

I was eight months pregnant, not exactly a great job candidate. I had thirty days or less to get my life in order before my child was born. I begged Robert. I pleaded with him. Finally I threatened.

“If you don’t do something, make some effort to get ahold of yourself and start working through some of this disaster, then I’m leaving you.”

“Don’t let the screen door hit you on your way out,” he said.

Greg laughed raucously, as if that were really funny.

“If I leave, I won’t be coming back.”

“Promise?”

More laughter. I went upstairs and started packing. As each suitcase was filled, I kept expecting Robert to show up at the door. I kept assuming that when it came right down to it, he’d never let me go. Once I had all my things, all the baby’s things in suitcases or boxes, there was no choice but to face him again. I went back downstairs to give him another chance.

Greg was sleeping on the dining room floor. Robert was sitting in front of the TV with a beer in his hand.

“I’m going to call my mother to come and get me,” I said.

“The phone’s dead,” he answered. “You’ll have to walk down to the Mini Mart.”

The store was four blocks away. We had no cars, Greg’s BMW was in the driveway, but I didn’t even ask to borrow it. I walked.

At the pay phone, I made a collect call.

“Babs, it’s me.”

“Hi, honey, I’m so glad you called,” she said. “How are you feeling? How’s my little grandbaby.”

Her warmth and welcome, the tenderness and care in her voice, broke through the iciness surrounding my heart. I began to cry.

“Come get me, Mama,” I managed to mutter.

When I got back to the house, it was locked. I had no key. Robert, Greg and the BMW were gone. My suitcases were piled up by the front step. I sat down on the front porch and waited almost five hours on that cold winter night before Babs arrived to rescue me.

I never saw Robert again.